War on Terror-Progress in Iraq

WAR ON TERROR--PROGRESS IN IRAQ -- (House of Representatives - October 26, 2005)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.

It is an honor to serve with him on the Committee on Armed Services. Of all the committees in the House, if our country is at war, there is not a better place to serve if one is too old to do anything else. But this is a great committee to serve on. He leads this committee well, and it is a great honor for me to learn this business, working with him on that committee.

I went to Iraq in July, and I want to talk a little bit about that. I grew up in west Texas. It is an arid desert. As we drove around some of the places in Baghdad and Kuwait, the territory, the scenery was remarkably similar to west Texas. I grew up where summers were hot, and the weather was bad, and the heat and blowing dirt, dust storms sometimes so bad that the street lights would come on at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. So I am a reasonably informed consumer about hot, bad weather.

I got off the C-130 in Baghdad on that July day and stepped out into the meanest, nastiest weather I could have ever imagined. It was so much worse than anything I had ever experienced in west Texas. And we have got the finest group of young men and women, and some not so young, leading this country's fight in Iraq against the terrorists, doing an incredible job.

I found a group of men and women whose morale was incredibly high. They knew they were doing the right thing. They knew they were well equipped. They knew they were well led. They knew they were doing a job that has to be done to protect this country. And they are accomplishing great things.

The other side, it is almost as if they have got their fingers in their ears and their hands over their eyes because they do not see this march to progress that we are doing. The elections last week that we got the official word yesterday 78 percent of the country voted for this Constitution, an Iraqi Constitution, not an American Constitution but an Iraqi Constitution. The march, the votes we have had, the votes we will have in December. We are making progress.

The stories that are not told is the electricity that is flowing, the commerce that is going on, the health care system that is reemerging, the stock market that is reemerging. All these good things that happen in this country get ignored, and it is partly our fault because we are not doing a very good job. Ever since I have gotten back from Iraq, every speech I have made, every talk I have given, I have included a piece of why it is important that we stay the course. And I hate to use that phrase. Let me rephrase that: that we finish this job, that we do not break faith, as our colleague just mentioned, with the young men and women who have led this fight.

Liberty is not cheap. It comes at an incredibly high price. It is easy to be a hawk, but we hawks ought to know the cost. Every one of my colleagues has been with me and others to Walter Reed and to Bethesda to go out there and hug the necks of those young men and women whose lives are forever changed, in some instances in a blink of an eyelash, to hug their necks, to thank them.

I have had three casualties since I have been elected. The first was a young man that was killed in November of last year, Brian Baker; another young man killed this summer, Mario Castillo; a young man who was killed from Odessa. I go see those families. There is nothing one can say. One cannot make the pain any easier, but I go hug their necks and tell them thank you, thank you on behalf of the country for their sacrifice.

I was sitting that evening with young widow Amy Baker, pregnant with twins who would not see their dad.

It is a high price we are paying, but liberty is not cheap. Through that crushing grief that only a young widow can feel, she looked at me with tears streaming down our her face and she said, You make sure you tell President Bush to finish this fight. Do not let Brian have died in vain. Do not, in effect, break faith with Brian, because he knew he was doing the right job. He knew he was there getting something done.

The gentleman mentioned earlier the ``greatest generation,'' and it was. My dad is in that generation. He fought World War II. He fought in Korea. And they accomplished great things. But the men and women who have done this fight in Afghanistan and Iraq can lay claim to having freed over 50 million people. We can argue about weapons of mass destruction and why we got where we are and all that kind of stuff, and there is a place for that. Let us do that. But at its core, they have freed 50 million people. Twenty-five million people in Afghanistan have gone to vote, created a democracy there. It is not perfect, but they are free today. They were under the Taliban, one of the most horrible regimes we can imagine, where the women were chattel. If I did not like something my wife did, I would just cut her head off, slit her throat, and let her die on the side of the road. They are no longer in charge over there; Karzai is. And a democracy is emerging there.

Twenty-seven million people are free in Iraq today, out from under the jackboot of Saddam Hussein, arguably the most ruthless, cold-blooded killer of any generation. He is in jail on trial for his life, as he should be.

So let us do not lose sight of the fact that we have accomplished great things, and we will stay in Iraq and get this job finished.

Let me close with a story in Afghanistan. We went from Iraq to Afghanistan, and we went out to a forward operating base, flew out of Kabul on a Chinook helicopter for about an hour, across a landscape where the way of life had not changed in 1,000 years: nomadic herders, tents, mud huts, sheep, those kinds of things. We landed in this forward-operating base, and this lieutenant colonel in charge there told us this story about they were on patrol one day, mounted in Humvees, and they were going down this dirt path because there are no paved roads in this part of the world. A young 10-year-old boy comes running out of a village that they were approaching, waving his arms and screaming and hollering, trying to get their attention. They stopped and waited for him to get there. And he breathlessly told them that the bad guys had come the night before and put a bomb in their path just ahead of that Humvee.

So our guys dismounted, got out there. Sure enough, there was a bomb, bad enough that it would have killed everybody in that lead Humvee. They disarmed it. And as they were getting ready to proceed, the lieutenant. colonel asked that young man, why did you risk your life to come tell us this, because obviously you are a marked individual now for having helped the other side. The 10-year-old little boy, in that innocence of youth, simply looked at him and said, well, when the Americans came, I got to start going to school.

So the anecdotes are full of these types of stories all over the place, what wonderful things our country has done on behalf of these people in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has come at a high price, but liberty always comes at a high price; to get it originally and to keep it comes at a very, very high price.

I want to thank each one of those moms and dads and husbands and wives and children tonight who grieve over the loss of a loved one, who grieve over the injury of a loved one. I thank you. It sounds awful trite and there is not much more we can do, but each one of us who expresses it does it from the absolute core of our being, to tell these families thank you so very much for your sacrifice.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for letting me participate tonight. I appreciate that. God bless each and every one of our men and women in uniform tonight, wherever they are serving, whatever their responsibilities are, and particularly bless their families as they make sacrifices that most of us do not have to make, that we are not called upon to make.

So we simply want to make sure that every single day somebody somewhere thanks them and their loved ones for their service to this country. God bless each one of them, and God bless this great United States of America.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, let me say one more thing, if I might, and the gentleman said it already. A free Iraq, an Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors is no longer a sanctuary for the bad guys, will make the Middle East a safer place to be; and by extension, this country will also be a much safer place, as will the world.

So I agree with the gentleman's assessment, and we will finish the job.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

http://thomas.loc.gov